Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 14:01:26 +0000 (GMT)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Scott=20Hamilton?= <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Perplexed, all variations



Chris, this is by no means a stupid or ill-tempered
post, but it bears no relation to the reality I
inhabit. I just can't take it seriously. I'll try to
explain my befuddlement by relating some of your
comments to some of the activity I've been engaging in
lately.

'With the people'??  Are you serious?  'Win
> over to revolutionary  politics'??  Maybe our fellow
workers will win you  over to revolutionary
> politics someday, instead of this 'I am the teacher
> of the poor, stupid  proletariat which is limited to
trade union  consciousness' nonsense.

Quite frankly, I would love it if the proles over here
exhibited more *trade union* consciousness - in many
cases, it would be an improvement! When I'm talking of
'winning people over' I might be referring to
something as simple as convincing a worker that
economic migrants and refugees are not coming here to
steal his/her job, and should not be tossed back into
the sea. I might be talking about convincing a
striking teacher that the cleaners at her school
deserve a pay rise too, and that she shouldn't argue
for her own rise on the basis of how much more skilled
and deserving she is, compared to said cleaners. I
might be convincing someone else that Hitler was not a
communist...

I fail to see how putting arguments like these to
workers makes me a wicked Leninist. In the same way, I
fail to see how people like the ones mentioned above
are going to win me over to revolutionary politics.
I'm *not* saying that I have nothing to learn from
them; I am suggesting that they are not currently
revolutionaries, if the word revolutionary is to have
any meaning.

Cheers
Scott






 

===="Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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